UCF Research Guides: Scholarly Communication: Citation Analysis & Metrics

Areas of Interest in Scholarly Publishing

Available Services

Citation Metrics
Primary Contact: Ven Basco

The AltMetrics Movement

Though highly dependent on mutliple factors (institutional acceptance, department expectations, and your academic publishing preferences), Altmetrics, seeks to include data from nontraditional online sources such as Twitter, blog posts, and online citation managers. For more information, visit:

http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

Article Level Metrics

Article-Level Metrics -- A SPARC Primer
"Article-Level Metrics (ALMs) are rapidly emerging as important tools to quantify how individual articles are being discussed, shared, and used. This resource is designed to give campus leaders and other interested parties an overview of what ALMs are, why they matter, how they complement established utilities and metrics, and how they might be considered for use in the tenure and promotion process."
PLOS Article-Level Metrics

Defining Citation Analysis

What is it?

Citation analysis investigates the number of times an article or an author has been referred to by others in the field of scholarly literature. It can be used to judge the impact an author or a publication has had upon its peers.

Why use it?

Citation analysis can be used for several things, including:

paying homage to pioneers
giving credit for related work
substantiating one’s knowledge claims
providing background reading
articulating a research methodology

Citation search analysis at the University of Central Florida is often used in faculty promotion and tenure review, when making hiring decisions, and reporting annual accomplishments.

Other Citation Tools

Certain disciplines, journals, and document types may not be well represented in the more traditional citation counting resources, like Web of Science or SCOPUS. Some databases that also provide citation counts include:

MathSciNet -- User can find the top cited books and top cited journal articles by subject classification and by publication year. A new search page is reached by clicking on the Citations tab. Here, one finds the Author Citations search, the Journal Citations search, a search for highly cited articles and books by classification and by year, and the Top 10 Lists.
EBSCO databases including Academic Search Premier, America: History and Life, Business Source Premier, CINAHL, Communication and Mass Media Complete, Environment Index, Historical Abstracts, PsycINFO.
ScienceDirect After searching an author or publication in Science Direct, click on the Cited By icon in the Article Toolbox to identify the number of times articles are cited by publications indexed in Science Direct or Scopus.
JSTOR Each retrieved resource provides links identifying publications in JSTOR that have cited a work in addition to a link to Google Scholar to locate open access materials items citing the work. JSTOR also provides a list of reference for each resource
PsycNet ***
This comprehensive database of psychological resources published by APA provides a searching tab entitled Cited References. (UCF Library subscribe to SciFinder
Search results include several options for retrieving cited references.
Compendex from EI Village. Includes number of times article is cited in Scopus since 1996. Citing articles are listed.
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Databases
CiteSeer.IST (Scientific Literature Digital Library)

A scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science. CiteSeer aims to improve the dissemination, retrieval, and accessibility of scientific literature.

Energy Citations Database

Provides energy-related scientific and technical information including bibliographic records of literature in disciplines of interest to DOE such as chemistry, physics and engineering. It includes citations to report literature, conference papers and journal articles from the Department of Energy (DOE) and its predecessor agencies, the Energy Research & Development Administration (ERDA) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Published by U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI)

ISIHighlyCited.com

A free site produced by ISI - Institute for Scientific Information. Provides information on the top half percent of researchers in 21 broad band subject areas of the sciences.

Available Resources

Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics) This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Counts citations from articles indexed by ThomsonISI, the company that owns Web of Science. It consists of seven databases containing information gathered from thousands of scholarly journals, books, book series, reports, conferences, and more. We subscribe to three of the seven databases.
Citation Indexes for finding articles that cite a given author or citation.
- Science Citation Index Expanded (1965+)
- Social Sciences Citation Index (1965+)
- Arts & Humanities Citation Index (1975+)

Citation Connection is now available. This includes:
- Data Citation Index (1900+)
- Derwent Innovations Index – Patents Database (1963+)
- Book Citation Index: Scholarly Books (2005+)
- Conference Proceedings Citation Index (1990+)
- Index Chemicus (IC) (1989+)
- Current Chemical Reactions (1993+)
- Current Contents Connect (1998+)
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Produces more cited references than Web of Science or but it also produces duplicates. Does not provide a complete list of all the publications it indexes, so it is difficult to know if it provides comprehensive citation counts.
Use Google Scholar as a first step of discovery, but then focus your research by using specific databases relevant to your subject discipline.

Harzing's Publish or Perish
This tool is free to download, and it runs on input from Google Scholar. Outputs a variety of statistics such as h-index, average number of citations per year, etc.